this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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You don't need to be online or use a digital device to be tracked by your metadata. Your credit card purchases, phone calls, vehicle license plate, and more can all be correlated.
Additionally, saying "just don't use a phone" is no different than saying "just wear a mask outside your house". Both are impractical, if not functionally impossible, in modern society
I'm not arguing which is "worse", only speaking to the reality we live in
I am arguing which is worse. There are people in Palestine who don't have the internet, don't have a phone, and don't have a credit card. How are they being tracked without facial recognition?
I also didn't say don't use a phone. I don't know where you got that
I know what you're arguing and why you're arguing it and I'm not arguing against you.
I'm simply adding what I consider to be important context
And again, the things I listed specifically are far from the only ways to track people. Shit, we can identify people using only the interference their bodies create in a wifi signal, or their gait. There are a million ways to piece together enough details to fingerprint someone. Facial recognition doesn't have a monopoly on that bit of horror
FR is the buzzword boogieman of choice, and the one you are most aware of because people who make money from your clicks and views have shoved it in front of your face. But go ahead and tell me about what the "real threat" is 👍👍👍
I didn't say "real threat" either. I'm not sure where you're getting these things I'm not saying
I think facial recognition isn't as much of a "buzzword" as much as it is just the most prevalent issue that affects the most people. Yes there are other ways to track people, but none that allow you to easily track everybody regardless of their involvement with modern technology other than facial recognition
(Just to be clear I'm not downvoting you)
That's why I put "real threat" in quotes ; I was paraphrasing what I consider to be the excessive focus on FR
I'm a security professional. FR is not the easiest way to track everybody/anybody. It's just the most visible and easily grok'd by the general public because it's been in movies and TV forever
To whit, FR itself isn't what makes it "easy", but rather the massive corpus of freely available data for training combined with the willingness of various entities to share resources (e.g. Sharing surveillance video with law enforcement).
What's "easiest" entirely depends on the context, and usually it's not FR. If I'm trying to identify the source of a particular set of communications, FR is mostly useless (unless I get lucky and identify, like, the mailbox they're using or something silly like that). I'm much more interested in voice identification, fingerprinting, geolocation, etc in that scenario
Again, FR is just...known. And visible. And observable in its use for nefarious purposes by shitty governments and such.
It's the stuff you don't see on the news or in the movies that you should really be worried about
(and I'm not downvoting you either; that's for when things don't contribute, or deserve to be less visible because of disinformation; not for when you disagree with someone)